I have discovered that if you use irattach to bring up the IrDA stack on the Empeg before the player application starts, the player application somehow interferes with the IrDA stack and errors will appear on the screen. These error messages are:

irlap_driver_rcv(), Unknown frame ef received!

If you then try to use IrDA, sometimes you will have success, but the above error message will appear frequently. Most times, however, you will also receive the error message:

IrLAP, no activity on link!

The solution is to do your irattach AFTER the player application starts. I have a solution in this thread along with asking what a better way would be. This post is for anyone searching on the BBS for the error messages above, but if anyone has comments as to why the player app would do this, I would love to hear them.